Employment Interface

For some time now, Certification Magazine has been accomplishing the task of giving insightful and valuable advice to IT professionals on not just which certification programs to target and why, but also on their careers overall.

One way the magazine has accomplished this is with our Interface department, where we’ve visited with companies month after month to learn how they utilize IT professionals and to what end.

But we’ve recently retooled Interface to focus on speaking with companies about their initial hiring of IT pros, whether at entry level, mid level or high level. We’re learning what IT hirers look for and why, how they make their eventual hires and whether or not these hires prove effective. We’re hoping this will help prepare you for interviews (whether giving them or getting them) and other aspects of the hiring process and give you a better perspective on what to expect in such situations.

This issue also investigates a rather intangible medium: virtual reality. The term itself leads one to think back to films that first suggested it as being possible, such as 1992’s “The Lawnmower Man,” in which a scientist performs experiments with intelligence-enhancing drugs and virtual reality on a simpleminded gardener. That film’s titular character was played by Jeff Fahey, who also played a man who becomes obsessed with a virtual-reality game that can resurrect his murdered girlfriend in cyberspace in the 1995 movie “Virtual Seduction.”

As absurd and implausible as these examples of virtual reality in film may be, they did prove eerily prescient. Now that virtual reality has found a home on the Internet, a whole host of virtual worlds have cropped up. While no one is getting maliciously experimented on or brought back from the dead in these spaces, they do present an unending series of questions about what is or isn’t legal, or moral, in a virtual environment.

Our Job Roles feature speaks with individuals responsible for administering virtual worlds to find out what makes them tick (apparently it’s a lot of coffee).